Doctoral Dissertation in Political Science: Explaining Patterns of Regulatory Enforcement

本博士论文研究支持项目主要研究政府职业安全监管的执行模式。该项目开发并检验了一种理论，解释了职业安全与健康管理局（OSHA）如何与各州机构合作，执行《职业安全与健康法》。该项目的中心目标是推进政治科学的知识状态，了解守法的不确定性如何改变法律的执行方式。该项目通过展示合规的不确定性如何导致：(1)制定反映战略决策的执法程序；(2)采用基于易于观察的政策产出的执法人员评估程序。这些惯例和程序直接决定了监管结果，并进一步制约了寻求影响政策结果的强大集团的成功。要检验这些理论，就要考察在整个执法过程中如何处理个别案件。因此，构建了一个数据集，通过区分检查目标、罚款征收、罚款后谈判和诉讼来分解OSHAct的执行过程。该数据集包括受OSHAct监管的所有私人设施的信息，使调查人员能够诊断被过滤到执法过程中的设施的处理情况，以及那些完全避免检查的设施。此外，通过获得有关个别设施实际安全状况的信息（甚至职业安全与卫生管理局自己的外地办事处也无法获得这些信息），调查人员可以比较在执法过程的不同阶段、在遵守情况的不同不确定程度下以及在各种群体影响环境下“类似”设施的待遇。这些数据是通过对职业安全与卫生和州机构外地办事处的抽样人员进行访谈收集的。

This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project focuses on patterns of enforcement in government regulation of occupational safety. The project develops and tests a theory that explains how the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), in cooperation with state agencies, enforces the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The project's central aim is to advance the state of knowledge in political science on the way in which uncertainty about compliance alters how the law is enforced. The project does so by showing how uncertainty about compliance leads to 1) the development of enforcement routines that reflect strategic decision-making and 2) the adoption of evaluative procedures for enforcement personnel based on easily observed policy outputs. These routines and procedures directly determine regulatory outcomes and further condition the success of powerful groups seeking to influence policy outcomes.Testing the theories involves an examination of how individual cases are treated throughout the enforcement process. Therefore, a data set has been constructed that disaggregates the OSHAct enforcement process by distinguishing inspection targeting, penalty imposition, and post-penalty negotiation and litigation. This data set includes information about all private facilities subject to OSHAct regulation, allowing the investigator to diagnose both the treatment of facilities that are filtered into the enforcement process and those facilities that avoid inspection altogether. Furthermore, with access to information about actual safety conditions at individual facilities (information that is not available even to OSHA's own field offices), the investigator can compare the treatment of "similar" facilities in different stages of the enforcement process, under different levels of uncertainty about compliance, and in a variety of group influence environments. The data are collected through interviews with personnel in a sample of OSH and state agency field offices.